


in the middle of a dream

by TLvop



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dragons, Gen, Major AU - Character Backstory, Treat, soulmark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-23 17:22:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9668195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TLvop/pseuds/TLvop
Summary: Humans pass through her mountains like a river, and few know well enough to keep their whispers low.--The one where Natasha is an ancient dragon, and has hidden from the world for a very long time.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zippit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zippit/gifts).



Humans pass through her mountains like a river, and few know well enough to keep their whispers low. She catalogs their words and movements in the haze of sleep, and twitches them away with annoyance when awake, unless they speak of interesting things.

Few come to visit her, now. Once she had many guards, for her many doors, but she has grown long enough with age to fill halls if she wills it, and her hearing acute enough to monitor her own security, and the king she chose to rule has died along with his heirs, along with his kingdom.

So she sleeps, and dreams of the words of philosophers, of the secrets of years past, of the books bound with magic to never rot, their words hidden in her mind.

She hears him long before she wakes, approaching from a mountain path, a way of merchants long fallen into disrepair. He sings a song to himself, part fairytale and part instruction-list, and it sounds familiar. The door opens, some three miles off, and so do her eyes.

She waits, and breathes in deeply as she does, belly pressed to the cool floor of her inner chamber. The alarms do not sound; there is no warning that the invader stay where he is or face deadly counter-measures. But the magic smells intact.

Curious, she moves forward, unwinding as she does. She does not go towards the ground of the antechamber of the great library, where he is heading as he still sings snatches of the song cautiously to himself, but rather through the higher arches, carefully around the collections of gifts from foreign emissaries she has been given over many centuries. She curves through a meeting hall, which is when she can tell he hears her – his footsteps stumbling slightly, breath catching, before he continues. She nudges the dining table gently to the side, all sixty-two seats of it, and stops, watching through the broken rail that had once been beautifully sculpted by the best mason on this side of the ocean.

When it had been broken, when her treasure store had been invaded and she had destroyed an army that dared to bring destruction into her home –

It is a reminder of what can never be fixed.

She blinks, and watches through the many unlit chandeliers, as the man comes into the room.

He is in young middle-age. Dressed in clothes of good quality, but made for travel and work, and made strangely. He has a bow, undrawn, and smells nervous but not frightened. He looks around the dark room, and holds up a lantern cautiously. It casts a weak light around him.

She feels some obscure sympathy for him, so small in the midst of such space, but she waits.

"Hello?" He calls into the room, still looking forward instead of up. "I've – well, I guess I've come to seek an audience."

She's heard his language before. Not the one of the song, which is older, but from the travelers in the mountains. Human tongues are not difficult to decipher, not after she has heard so many.

She breathes a laugh, and moves forward onto the ceiling arches that hold the chandeliers, bundling her long wings closer to herself as she does. "And who are you," she says, softly, "to ask?"

He's looking up, now, eyes wide, though she thinks he still cannot see her. There is fear, now. Good. That is only wise.

"I'm called Barton, or – Hawkeye," he says, after he catches his breath. She realizes belatedly that the language he is speaking is not his own, and her curiosity flames brighter. "I'm a soldier, I guess. I'm not – anything special, but a woman – a woman I met after a battle saw a mark I was born with, and spoke of you, and – I've been looking for years. When I could," he adds. "My time's not entirely my own."

As he speaks, she sinks closer to him, belly in the corridor pressing scales against the floor to balance her descent.

He sees her moving, as a shape in the darkness, and his eyes widen as she approaches, though he stands still. He goes almost preternaturally still, as she reaches forward to breathe him in. He smells of strange lands, spices, metals, and something else. He's dropped his lantern, but it has not gone out. Instead of a flame inside, there is a thing that looks like glass but is not, and glows.

"Hi," he says, and smiles almost reflexively.

"Hi," she replies, privately amused, still whispering. At this size, she could deafen him at full volume. And she is not yet certain she wishes to change. She has earned her length in the long silences of the world. She tilts her head, and he moves his hand to the front of his shirt, unfastening it and shrugging it off. There are several marks on his skin, but only one she recognizes – the red of lingering blood from childbirth, deepened to purple-red with age, over his heart and up towards his neck.

She knew. That does not stop her from reaching forward with suddenly human hands, with an elbow and wrist instead of the mostly useless vestigial limbs she usually has, covered only in the newest of scales. She stops before touching him, for her talons to shrink to fingernails, for her skull to shrink to human size so she can get close without slicing him with her teeth, then she sets her hand against his skin. It has been a very long time since she has felt the skin of another. (How long? She can no longer tell.) His eyes are wide, but he doesn't flinch away. He's brave. Many humans are brave. Without her mark on him, it would not make him special.

"And what," she says, finally, voice pained, "you wish to be a king?"

"What?" He asks, then abruptly shakes his head. "No, no, I thought --," he puts his hand over the one she has on his chest, movement cautious. "I didn't know if you were real," he admits, suddenly. "But the more I heard -- I don't know much about people," he says, switching tracks suddenly. "But I know they need other people."

She laughs, and raises her head to breathe life into the oil of the chandeliers. _Ever-burning_ , they used to say, but she became used to darkness. She watches him follow the line of her body, from his chest to the ceiling, across the many stone arches, and to the broken rail in front of the meeting hall, and then out of sight.

"What do you think now?" she asks, as his silence extends.

"You never built a place this large for just you," he says, and she can hear the sadness in his voice.

She's quiet.

She reaches her hands to his eyes, and gently closes them with her thumbs. When she lets go, she is in clothes similar to his, though her shirt is made of heavily brocaded cloth. Her feet are bare, and scaled yet. There is time before she must resort to footwear.

"What's your name?" he asks, and she tells him.

Not the name her king gave her, or her children, or the kingdom that is now lost. The one she was born with on her lips, as natural as fire and magic.

His brow quirks, and she feels she could learn to enjoy puzzling out his expressions. "I have no idea how to say that," he admits, plainly, with the good grace to have some embarrassment.

She thinks of the names she has heard, sliding through her dreams. "Natasha?" she asks, after a moment. "It is still used?"

"It's still used," he says. "My first name's Clint," he adds, and begins to re-fasten his shirt. Natasha removes her hands from his face, regretfully. "Is there anything you want to take with you?"

"It will keep itself," she says. "That is how I made it. What is your lantern made of? And your bracelet, why does it tick?"

"Oh," Clint says, picking up the lantern, and looking back around the room, a sudden sense of understanding on his face. "You're going to have so many new books to read."

**Author's Note:**

> I really, really hope you weren't kidding with your extra "likes"! Have a great ChocolateBox :)
> 
> Thank you to shadow_lover for encouraging me to write this, and then fixing my grammar/spelling! Any errors remaining are entirely my own.


End file.
